Thursday 8 January 2009 07.02 EST
First published on Thursday 8 January 2009 07.02 EST

If one is ready, willing and able to fork out £60 to a theatre for the best seat in the house, it might be expected that the box office would leap on the proffered cash. But, apparently not if you're by yourself or want what's deemed an awkward number of tickets.

Internet forums have been up in arms for weeks now at a sneaky policy to shunt singletons into the circles where possible, leaving those lucrative stalls seats to tidy pairs. If there are plenty of tickets left, you should be fine. If it's a popular show and your difficult singleton purchase will leave just one or three empty seats in that row, though, you'll be moved along elsewhere. It's not a new procedure for many ticket outlets, but it's an innovation for some of the top West End theatres – primarily those operated by Ambassador Theatre Group.

If you ring and talk to a friendly box-office assistant, you could get lucky. On the web, it's less likely your purchase will go through without a glitch: as I've repeatedly found, it's likely your purchase will be halted and an error message will pop up advising you to call the ticket line.

One disgruntled theatregoer told me that when she enquired about buying a pair of tickets for The Woman in Black at the Ambassador Group's Fortune Theatre, she was offered plum stalls seats; when she amended her order to the single seat, she had to make do with the upper circle. Another, looking for a good seat at the Old Vic – an independent theatre, but with ticketing handled by Ambassador – for The Norman Conquests before Christmas, could only have a restricted-view position at the back of the upper circle, as it was the only seat in the entire theatre that didn't infringe the new policy.

It's not just singletons who are affected. If there are two blocks of three seats, one behind the other, theatregoers won't be able to buy two together, as that would contravene the policy. Instead, they'll have to buy one from each block, leaving those sought-after pairs intact. A friend told me that when she bought two tickets for a play at the Donmar – again, courtesy of Ambassador – she wasn't allowed to get a couple on the end of the row, because it would have left a single seat next to them.

Clearly, the plan is to dress the house as efficiently as possible, but as one commenter has pointed out, it's a counter-productive policy: "I don't want a restricted-view seat at nosebleed level, so I won't be seeing it." Nor do people want to sit separately from their partner or group of friends simply because the fancy-schmancy ticketing program has an aversion to ones and threes. My tip? Ring the box office and talk to a human being. They're more likely to have common sense and empathy – as long as their boss isn't standing right behind them.